“Ouch! Let go, you beast!” Then I remembered everything. I sat up just as we jolted on such a bump that I was slammed into the side of a wagon. “Ow!”

Bee and I were crammed into the bed of the wagon with Vai’s chest, the Taino basket, and a dozen crates heaped with glistening oysters. The crates jostled with each jounce.

A man looked around from the driver’s seat. He was a white-haired, light-skinned elder with a pipe in his mouth and his shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal sun-weathered forearms corded with muscle. “The lass wakes! I thought sure she was drunk as a lord and would sleep it off ’til teatime. Especially with that howling. Thought it was dire wolves, didn’t I? Or a pack of women cast off for their unsightly looks and scolding tongues!” He cackled at his own jest.

Fiery Shemesh! What nightmare was this?

“Bee, where are we?” I whispered as I rubbed my bruised shoulder. “Where is the dragon?”

“The dragon cast us out on land,” she whispered back.

The road was a cart track, two ruts cutting through damp earth. Mud slopped with each turn of the wheels, but we were high and dry. The two oxen pulling the wagon had the stolid pace of animals who can walk all day without stopping. Around us lay green hills ablaze with spring flowers. I shivered, for although the wagoner was content in his shirtsleeves, it seemed deathly cold.

Rory was sitting up next to the driver, wearing one of Vai’s best dash jackets, the fabric red, gold, and orange squares limned by black. He took a puff on the pipe and coughed violently.

The old man chortled again. “You smoke like a woman, lad! No doubt comes of being forced to attend on your sister and cousin all these months, as you say. I’ll teach you to be a man.”

The sight of Rory wearing the dash jacket distracted me. “Bee! How could you let Rory wear that particular jacket? That’s the one Vai wore the morning after we…”

Her foot poked me to silence. “How could I have remembered that!”

“He’s already got a smudge on the elbow!”

She gazed past me, steadfastly mute. Back the way we had come rose the roofs of fishermen’s shacks next to a small marble temple whose pinnacle was marked with the chariot of a sea god. A sleepy strand gave way to rocky shallows where men raked for oysters. Beyond lay an islet prominently marked by a stone pillar and a tree so large I could tell it was an oak even from this distance. The gray-blue waters of the sea soughed in the brisk wind, chipped with foam. Out on the water it was raining, but up here it was dry and sunny. It looked a cursed lot like the land I had grown up in.